Replace PCGA-CD51 drive

I have a couple of PCGA-CD51 external PCMCIA drives that don't work. The drives are over 20 years old and over this time the lasers and mechanisms can fail. The PCGA-CD51 external drives house standard laptop style CD units so I was wondering if these external drives could be fixed with cheap ATAPI laptop drives. 

A quick search of eBay showed that Teac drives are fairly common and the Toshiba models were rare. Getting a direct model replacement seemed impossible, but the theory being that any with the same ATAPI connector would work.

I initially ordered a Toshiba XM-1802D, but this was either faulty or incompatible. My next order was for the Teac CD-224E, which was much more common and I was able to get 3 for about £10 inc shipping. 

Opening up the PCGA-CD51 is easy, and can be achieved by removing 2 screws from underneath the drive. All of the wires from the PCMCIA card hook up to an adaptor board, which connects to the drive and bridges all the PCMCIA functionality. Simply unscrew the drive and remove the adaptor board, noting that there's a connecting ribbon to the headphone jack board, which shouldn't be pulled too hard.

Plugging in the replacement drive was the reverse process, minus all the brackets at this stage so it could be tested.

Booting up on the Amiga A1200 with pcmciacd.device driver shows the drive and IdeFix properly shows the drive name. 

Success!

Finally the old mounts were removed from the old drive and added to the replacement drive to ensure all screw mounts were available.

Testing with audio and games showed everything worked as expected. The only issue with the drive is the location of indicator led and eject button are different to the replaced Toshiba drive. This isn't too concerning because the front plate still works and fits the PCGA-CD51 case. PCGA-CD51s with Teac drives actually have different front plates. Sony made 2 variants depending on the drive as you can see in the below image

Top drive is a Teac variant and the middle is a Toshiba. The bottom is the replaced drive. If you plan a replacement you may want to consider trying to get at least the same manufacturer to also replace the front panel. If, like me, you are limited to a non matching variant then it should work fine but the panel will obviously look different. 

The objective was to get a working replacement. It may also be possible to get newer and faster drives to allow a speed boost if steaming video from the drive.